About Me

Friday, December 18, 2009

Smart Phones.... again

So I mentioned in the last post that Samil got a new phone. I've also mentioned Samil's troubles with his borrowed Palm Pre here and here. Well, he is now the proud owner of the Sprint's most popular Google phone, or so people told him it was. Last weekend when he came home he couldn't get it activated online. Monday night he attempted again...

Samil plunked himself down on our comfy chair ready to set his phone up using mine while I played Modern Warfare 2. After fighting with the Internet set up for a while, he started yelling at his laptop and then called Sprint. He was put on hold for an excruciating (to me) five minutes. After the customer service rep got all of his information, she took a look at his phone details and said "your phone should be activated."

"Really?"
"Yes, it should be working."
"But..." ::his phone rings:: "oh."
Then Samil picked up his phone and started talking to the person who called him while the rep just sat on the line probably wondering what the fuck was going on. He then awkwardly told her thank you and hung up on her. She did tell him one important piece of advice before he hung up, which was to turn off his old phone for 24 hours so there wouldn't be any confusion in the network as to which phone was really Samil's.

When I finished up with my games, I made my way to my room, and I could hear him loudly exclaiming the joys of his new phone. "Oh man, they have a COMEDY App!?!?!?!!" Now, I am very comfortable admitting my addiction to my crackberry because I didn't get a fancy phone to have one, but for all the bells and whistles that make my life easier. Clearly, Samil did not get his smart phone for the newfangled productivity tools bundled with it, such as the To Do List, and the Calendar. We're different people, and honestly, I'm not sure if a calendar would help much. There is such a thing as lost causes.

The next morning I woke up to some little Mozart ditty playing from his bedroom. For 20 minutes. It was probably playing longer than that, but it woke me up just before my alarm, and continued playing through two of my snoozes, so it was at least twenty minutes. Samil was in the shower for part of this, and in the kitchen for the other part. So where could that little Mozart ditty be coming from? My bet was on him not being able to turn off his new alarm, but boy was I wrong.

I walk into the kitchen to make my tea, and found Samil playing with his new phone on the counter, about an inch away from a solid still wet quarter sized spill of blueberry smoothie.

"Your Blackberry - does the alarm go off even when the phone is off?"
"Yes."
"Oh. I didn't know phones did that." (my coworker said his phones been doing that since high school, just thought you should know.)
"Oh."
"Yeah... so my um, my old alarm was going off for a little bit, and I thought I was just hearing it in my head because like, it would always go off in the morning. But it turned out, I guess, that um, it was going off because the phone turned on. That's so weird."

In... his head. He thought he was hearing his alarm in his head. After hearing that, I wish he simply couldn't turn off the alarm on his new phone. Also, its just further proof that smart phones are not named because they make the holder smarter.